Wednesday, May 15, 2002

Goodbye Helen

It's been announced now, so I can talk about it.

Helen, the woman who ran the software engineering recruiting and training program at $COMPANY, is resigning, effective July 5th. Incidently, she's the person who hired me, and what she said in my interview was a motivating factor for my joining the company.

Ironically, what she told me was that she missed coding (she had been an engineer for 7 years before she started working on training and recruiting). I had asked her what she didn't like about her job, which is one of the things I always ask in an interview. And now, she's leaving, and that's part of the reason.

It sucks, because I both understand why she's leaving, and I REALLY don't want her to leave, because work just isn't going to be the same without her. I got involved in recruiting and training at work because I thought the way she ran them was a great thing, and now she's leaving, and I'm left wondering how much things will change as a result.

Will we be just another company, with HR people doing most of the recruiting? Will our trainging program, another of the things that made me work here, change for the worse?